Jesse Welles Featured in PBS Documentary on Mary Oliver
Jesse Welles has been featured in a recent PBS documentary about renowned poet Mary Oliver, reading one of her most celebrated works. This is a wonderful moment that brings together two voices: one beloved by generations of readers, and one carrying her legacy forward.
Who Was Mary Oliver?
Mary Oliver was an American poet known for her accessible yet profound explorations of nature, spirituality, and the human experience. Published over many decades, her collections touched millions of readers with their gentle wisdom and careful observation of the natural world. Her poems “The Journey” and “Wild Geese” are among her most beloved works, offering readers an invitation to authenticity and personal courage. Oliver passed away in 2019, but her influence continues through new generations discovering and celebrating her poetry.
Jesse Welles Reading Mary Oliver
In this special documentary feature, Jesse Welles shares a reading of one of Mary Oliver’s poems, bringing her words to life with fresh interpretation and reverence for the text.
Where to Watch
Jesse’s involvement with this documentary exists across different moments and platforms:
Full PBS Documentary
Watch the complete documentary on YouTube – Jesse’s feature appears at 25:31.
Instagram Reel
Jesse shared himself reading the full poem on his Instagram. This is the same footage that appears as a shorter snippet in the documentary. In the post text, Jesse simply states “i love mary.”
Being featured in a PBS documentary reading poetry is a meaningful recognition of artistry and craft. It’s a testament to Jesse’s talent as a performer and his ability to honor the work of writers who came before him. Mary Oliver’s poetry has always encouraged readers to live authentically and pay attention to the world around them—and moments like this, where her words are given new voice, keep that spirit alive.
Have you watched the documentary yet? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
When you listen to Jesse Welles, you can practically hear the veil between lie and truth being lifted. The Ozark, Arkansas, singer, songwriter and guitarist has emerged as a singular voice in folk and Americana, pairing plainspoken lyrics with rock ‘n’ roll attitude and an unflinching willingness to address the world around him. In 2024, Welles began self-filming performances beneath power lines in the Arkansas woods, capturing the naked intensity of his songwriting on a standard smartphone camera. The performances sparked a grassroots phenomenon, with viral anthems including “War Isn’t Murder,” “The Poor,” “That Can’t Be Right,” and “United Health” attracting millions of followers and nearly one billion total views and streams. Welles’s breakneck pace has continued: over two years, he released eight full-length albums and dozens of songs, while earning a remarkable four 2026 GRAMMY Award nominations. He ia also nominated for “Artist of the Year” at the 2026 Americana Awards and received the association’s prestigious “Spirit of Americana Award” for Free Speech in 2025. He has collaborated with kindred spirits, including Joan Baez, Billy Strings, Mt. Joy, Margo Price and Sierra Ferrell, while his music has drawn praise from Vulture, Rolling Stone, NPR, Billboard and CBS News, which urged listeners wondering whether folk music is still relevant to “take a listen to Jesse Welles.” His latest album, Masks Off, continues Welles’s tradition of confronting the moment with candor, humor and hope. Produced with Eddie Spear (Zach Bryan, Sam Barber), the album explores themes of collective unrest, abuse of power, I.C.E. raids, and technopagans, while also revealing the introspective and personal side of his songwriting. It pairs these new reflections with studio versions of fan-favorite protest songs that have become staples of his live set. A road-tested performer who logged more than 280 shows in a year, Welles continues to share truths—whether confronting the brazenness of society’s “haves” or offering more intimate reflections on life. “I’m still living where I was living, I’m still doing what I was doing, and I’m still wearing the same jeans that I was two years ago,” he says. “I’m still putting out music as fast as I can write it. I haven’t changed.”
Jesse Welles takes the fight to Dillon Amphitheater
The bard from Arkansas mixes protest with his signature wit and musicianship in a red-hot show beside the lake.
Jesse Welles may only be 33, but he’s got the bio of a musician much older. From his early days growing up in Arkansas steeped in Dylan, Nirvana and The Beatles to his early bands focused on metal and punk rock, Welles is better known these days as a protest singer of sorts.
All of that was on full display Saturday night on the shores of Dillon Reservoir where Welles and his crack touring band delivered a blistering two hours of music at Dillon Amphitheater. Since I last saw him at the Bluebird in the spring of 2025, Welles has solidified his status as the musical bard of the No Kings/anti-fascist movement, targeting everything from microplastics and health care to ICE, war and more in his lyrics.
Welles has been compared to everyone from John Prine and Dylan to Woody Guthrie and even Kurt Cobain. But since about 2023, he’s carved out his own unique niche as an artist who demands to be paid attention to as he sings about injustice with material that’s as funny as it is laser-focused on the bullshit that’s staring us all in the face.
And while many may know him from his iconic YouTube videos where it’s just him in a field singing his latest with an acoustic guitar, his full-band shows are not to be missed. It reminded me of when I saw Jason Isbell in the early days with the 400 Unit — a master singer-songwriter and virtuoso guitarist with a backing band adding significant punch to the material.
But he also does a fair number of songs with just himself, his guitar and a harmonica, with the band gradually filtering back onstage to color in the rest of the sonic spectrum. This transition was pulled off beautifully when one of his acoustic sets was followed by the full band plowing through a blazing jam of “Join ICE” — one of Welles’ most damning songs of the Trump era. That led to his mocking take on the billionaire hubris of the Elon Musks of the world in “SpaceXplosion” and “Masks Off” from his new album, an indictment of the powers that be running rampant and no longer caring who knows or sees.
A wandering musical palette
If Welles has proven one thing in the past few years it’s that he’s one of the most industrious songwriters out there. Along with his one-off topic-of-the-week YouTube songs, he’s been a one-man record factory in recent years: Two albums in 2024, six in 2025 and two so far this year.
Even with all that original work, he and the band found time for plenty of other material at the show in Dillon: Two from Nirvana (“Heart Shaped Box” and “Come as You Are”), John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Black Sabbath’s timeless “War Pigs” and even a dip in the Beatles’ pond with an inspired (and wholly unexpected) “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds.”
But where he connects with the crowd the most is always with his own material, evoking in equal parts his love for America and his deep disappointment in how it’s being managed. Never one to settle for metaphor or oblique references, Welles goes straight for the jugular with lyrics skewering everything from Walmart and United Health to wealth inequality, endless wars and the gaslighting that goes on to make us believe it’s all normal.
It was all there in Dillon, with Welles ending the show alone on stage with the stinging refrains of “War Isn’t Murder”:
Arthur Lee Land was waiting there. Arthur is one of those musicians who seems inseparable from Lyons and the Planet Bluegrass community. I’ve seen him around this area many times, and he remains one of those genuinely warm people who seems to have a smile ready whenever you see him. He mentioned Friday that this was something like his 24th appearance on the Wildflower stage. Whether anyone other than Arthur has kept exact count, his long history here is unquestionable. He recalled playing the Main Stage with songwriter Steve Seskin back in 2002 and has been appearing around Folks Fest and Lyons for decades. Land also talked about collaborating with his wife, comparing their creative relationship loosely to Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter—one providing the musical vehicle and the other helping supply the words. “In the Perfect Groove” was among the songs I caught, and the title pretty well describes Arthur himself. After dealing with prostate cancer several years ago, seeing him continuing to make music with such obvious gratitude and enthusiasm makes his appearances even more enjoyable. He also mentioned that he was looking forward to Jesse Welles later that evening. A friend had apparently shown Arthur an older video of Welles playing with a trio, and Land remembered being struck by just how much the group rocked. That comment would prove prophetic.
…
At a moment when the Trump administration, ICE, Pete Hegseth, health-care companies, corporations and virtually every other institution in America seem to be generating songwriting material by the hour, Welles has found an audience hungry for somebody willing to say something. That willingness matters to me. I wish more musicians would use the enormous platforms they have to speak about what is happening around them. I love Phish, but politics rarely enters their shows. Jerry Garcia generally avoided political pronouncements as well, although Bob Weir became much more outspoken and Phil Lesh certainly made his own political leanings known. Artists don’t have an obligation to become political commentators. But music has always had the ability to say things that speeches can’t, and right now I personally think we need more musicians willing to take that chance. Welles is certainly taking it. His acoustic portion included songs such as “Walmart,” “Fat,” “Philanthropist,” “Fentanyl,” “United Health” and “The Poor,” each taking aim at a different piece of modern American life.
Then the evening changed completely. The band walked on, and suddenly the Woody Guthrie comparison didn’t tell even half the story. Welles strapped on an electric guitar, and what had been a topical folk set became a legitimate rock-and-roll show. His band—guitars, bass, keyboards and drums—was extremely good, and Welles himself demonstrated that he can do considerably more than stand under a tree with an acoustic guitar and sing protest songs. The full-band portion moved through originals including “Join ICE,” “Red” and “Domestic Error,” but the covers showed just how hard this group can play. Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” absolutely raged. They also tackled Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” and the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” I’m admittedly not the world’s biggest Nirvana fan—I’ve always considered them more than a little overrated—but I’ll give Welles and the band credit for taking the song on their own terms. “War Pigs,” however, was another matter entirely. That thing rocked.
Arthur Lee Land had been right. Anyone who knows Jesse Welles only from the solo acoustic videos circulating online might be surprised by what happens when he plugs in. There’s a very real rock guitarist hiding underneath the folk-singer exterior. The currently posted setlist also shows that S.G. Goodman later joined Welles for Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” before Welles moved through another solo section and eventually returned to full-band material. It was quite a way to finish a very long Friday…
Jesse Welles had a concert in Richmond scheduled for July 29 but cancelled it once he arrived and realized the venue workers were on strike. Rather than continue to support the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden for not paying their workers a living wage, he promptly cancelled the show.
In solidarity with the workers on strike at the botanical garden we are rescheduling our show this evening in richmond.
To the fans: we would not want to put you in a position to cross the picket line, we are sorry
To the garden: pay a living wage or get lost
To the workers: never back down
We’ve rescheduled the show for friday, september 25th at The National. Your tickets from tonight will remain valid for the rescheduled date. For those who cannot make this date, refunds will be available at your original point of purchase.
The Grammy-nominated musician canceled his concert at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in support of the LGBG Workers United workers on strike. Jesse stands with these workers as they fight for the fair treatment and respect they deserve. That’s solidarity.
More info on the events at the strike and Jesse’s cancelling from a couple news stories:
Workers at Lewis Ginter earlier this summer organized a one-day strike in June and circulated a public petition calling on the nonprofit botanical garden to approve higher wages in a new labor contract that’s been under negotiation for more than a year.
Bridget Fitzgerald, an organizer with International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), which represents the Lewis Ginter worker union and approximately 600,000 other laborers across North America, said they reached out to Welles after those efforts fell short.
She said they reached out to Welles because of his status as a socially conscious folk musician who has scored critical praise and millions of social media views with protest songs like “No Kings” and “Join ICE,” hoping that he might offer to support the striking workers in some way.
“He did this of his own choosing. We did not request that he cancel,” Fitzgerald said in an interview with Style Weekly. “I applaud him. I think that’s a wonderful, humane thing to do. For an artist with quite a following to do this, it’s very uplifting.”
When I arrived, a healthy crowd had gathered outside the large iron gates. I was quickly offered signs and water by striking workers, community members showing their support, and Welles fans who had stayed to stand with them.
According to union members, this was not the first attempt by workers to bargain for better wages. They say employees first circulated a petition that was met with threats of legal action, were told they could no longer meet as a group, and soon afterward one member was fired.
Since then, the LGBG union has met with management multiple times, with wages remaining the central point of debate.
“We started with a $3.50 increase and have since lowered it to $2,” horticulturist and negotiating committee member Eryn Boyle told me.
According to Boyle, Lewis Ginter management initially countered with a 50-cent increase, followed by 75 cents, and has since proposed a 3% raise, which averages about 52 cents an hour for many union members.
The dispute escalated further when Jesse Welles canceled his performance in solidarity with the striking workers…
Welles has rescheduled his performance for Sept. 25 at The National and will honor or refund tickets purchased for the original show.
A small group of die-hard fans who had come for the concert stayed to show their support for the striking workers. One fan, proudly wearing Welles merchandise, shared his thoughts on the situation.
“It’s not about us being here. We are grateful to be invited. This is an awesome cause, and we really want there to be some change.”
Welles is known for his working-class lyrics and outspoken support for working people, and it seemed those values were shared by many of his fans.
During my time at the picket line, a number of fans drove up, realized what was happening, expressed their support, and drove off honking their horns in solidarity.
“This is how things change,” another fan said. “Getting out there and understanding there is an inequality problem, even on a scale like this. It’s getting out on the corners demanding change.”
The union will continue talks with management, but it seems the pressure is mounting.
With the cost of living continuing to rise, rents showing little sign of slowing, and many workers feeling their wages have failed to keep pace, it’s easy to understand why so many people are frustrated. More and more people are finding themselves priced out of the city they call home.
It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the world around you, especially as a young person. But at that picket line, I saw people advocating for themselves and, more importantly, for their neighbors, their partners, their friends, and complete strangers. For a moment, that made me breathe just a little bit easier.
No president has ever been more obsessed with being liked by celebrities, especially music stars, than Donald Trump. Suffice it to say, they have not returned the favor. In the decade-plus since he first slid down his golden escalator and announced his first run for president, Trump has inspired an enormous number of protest songs. Songwriters have taken on his racism, his sexism, his hypocrisy, his corruption, his greed, his dictatorial aspirations, and more. Some of these are somber, some are screeds, some are about policy, some are just visceral statements of deep personal revulsion.
Every genre in music has been chipping in — from punk rockers to rappers to folkies and indie singer-songwriters. Some of the artists on our list of Trump protest songs have been speaking truth to power for decades; others have spent a large part of their lives inside the Trump nightmare. They all light a torch to help us find a way out.
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8. Jesse Welles, ‘No Kings’ (2025)
Jesse Welles
A Woody Guthrie for the TikTok era, Jesse Welles has garnered millions of views with his clever lefty folk tunes. Of course, Donald Trump has been a target on songs like “Trump Trailers,” which imagines the Donald trying to pull off his egomaniacal huckster shtick if he was raised in a trailer park, or “Join ICE,” a satiric ad for new recruits. “No Kings,” written to inspire demonstrators at the protest rallies of the same name, embodies the spirit of Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” imagining a better world beyond Trumpism with lines like, “No hatred, no violence/No starvation and no greed/And no kings, no kings.” —J.D.
Jesse Welles appeared on NPR’s World Cafe with Raina Durus. A great interview discussion about his history and songwriting, as well as playing a few of his latest songs.
Chapter 1: Interview pt 1
“Folks say that maybe protest music brings about change. I don’t really see it that way. I think that change brings around music and that the songs are just a symptom of a greater ill. And it’s the people and their individual actions that make change.”
Raina Durus: You just heard a clip of the title track from the latest album from Jesse Welles. That’s called Masks Off on World Cafe.
I’m Raina Durus. Jesse Welles is my guest today. Jesse, welcome back to the World Cafe.
Jesse Welles: Hey, thanks for having me. It’s been a minute.
Raina Durus: I’m so happy to have you. I love this record. Why did you choose that song to open the album and to make it the title track?
Jesse Welles: Oh, it seemed seemed apt. It seemed a a good opening for the rest of the ideas that would be uh dispersed through the record that was kind of lead with the chaos that you uh that you’re seeing every day. and which at the chaos it’s kind of a tool to keep you so distracted
that you can’t even really um you can’t even spend long enough on one idea to know that any one thing is ridiculous. Yeah.
Raina Durus: I think it can be a challenge for artists to write music that touches on politics or things that are happening in the world without coming off as trit or
cliche. You manage to avoid that in your music. How do you approach writing about the news? What is your sort of philosophy behind writing?
Jesse Welles: You are a witness. You are mostly agnostic. And instead of listening to somebody’s opinion or ideas that they have about something that has happened, you try to figure out what exactly has happened. What is the epicenter? What is the event that has led to 50 different talking heads to expose their take on it? And then you find that that one central point and then you say it. Yeah. You know
Raina Durus: People have a tendency to call your music protest music. Do you see it as protest music?
Jesse Welles: People got to call things something. They need names and they need to organize it. They need to place it in their mind someplace where they feel like it belongs. Folks say that maybe protest music brings about change and stuff, but I don’t I don’t really see it that way. I
think that change brings around music and change brings around art and that the songs are just a symptom of a greater ill. And it’s the people and their individual actions that make change.
Raina Durus: We’re going to hear you perform a song now and then we’ll come back and talk some more. What can you tell us about the first song you’re going to play for us? Meet the new swamp.
Raina Durus: Live for the World Cafe. Meet the swamp. From my guest today, Jesse Welles. I’m Reena Durus. Jesse, you even before this interview started, you were sitting there strumming your guitar. It seems so natural. It almost seems like an extension of your body at this point. But when you started, I understand you actually had no idea how a guitar worked. Could you tell us about those early days learning to play guitar?
Jesse Welles: Yeah. Um, I bought one money I’d saved up when I was probably about 10 and um, [clears throat] grandma would give us I think like five bucks an A on a report card. And so three report cards go by, you got about 60 bucks or so. And they sold guitars at uh Walmart, little First Act brand ones. And I think it was 62 dollars maybe 7 something cents. And I got it and I got it home and I had never really seen anybody play a guitar. So I thought the only way to really change the sound of a string was to just turn the the tuning pegs. I thought the Beatles were turning their tuning pegs really quickly and broke a lot of strings on it real quick. Of course, I didn’t know really what to do about it. Nobody in my family played or I don’t remember anybody even coming back there and seeing how I was doing with it. I just I put it away. I was I still I was still just a kid. And then we moved down into the River Valley in in Arkansas. I had the guitar and I would still plink around on it. And the neighbor down the road uh saw me with it. He’s an older gentleman. He had two mules. They were named Bill and Hillary. And he drove like a 1952 Chevy that he had. Anyway, that’s besides the point. But he came down and he told me that he would show me how to tune it and uh and how to play. and he and he showed me how to play camptown races and other little melodies and how to put my fingers on the fretboard. And once I had gone down and and played a little with him, I was, you know, I was toast. I just played it non-stop from probably 12 or 13 years old, until um just a moment ago.
Raina Durus: If you’re just joining us, my guest on World Cafe today is Jesse Welles. So, you’re this kid playing music in Arkansas. Could you tell us about the town that you grew up in? You sort of painted the picture of this old man down the road with his old truck, these mules. What What was it like growing up there?
Jesse Welles: Um, I thought it was really nice. It feels like all of being a kid was learning how to write cursive. long division and fishing. Uh, I’d lived so far out that I didn’t necessarily have a lot of people to play with or anything like that. So, it was very much like build a fort, um, play by yourself and make believe and and and that sort of thing. It’s romantic now. At the time it was mundane. Yeah.
Raina Durus: Was there a place where you could see music or go play it as as you got older when like if you were in school, you’re all in a band.
Jesse Welles: We didn’t go to concerts or or anything like that. Um, but the the school band had a uh drum set and uh so me and my buddies, you know, we would all play on it and we would set up and in the gym for every little pep rally, every opportunity we had. And then there was a there was a barbecue restaurant downtown and they would let us go down there and we just played blues music. It was um we yeah we had a little group called the the stimulus package um which I I got a real kick out of that was um in the zeitgeist at the time. I think that was probably around 06 78 something like that.
Raina Durus: We’re going to hear you play another live song now. It’s called Won’t You Come Out Tonight. Where are you taking us in this song?
Jesse Welles: Um I guess we’re going to Ozark. Um, but that’s the thing is like I wrote it up in Estus Park and I was out there on Halloween and they closed down all the shops and all the kids got into a parade and the shop owners were handing out candy. I got such a kick out of it. You realize all these mountain towns are special and have their little differences, but they are all the same. And it reminded me of being a kid and I wrote this tune just about being in love and a mountain town. Yeah.
Raina Durus: Here’s Jesse Welles performing Won’t You Come Out Tonight live for World Cafe.
Raina Durus: Performing a song from his new album, Masks Off. That was Jesse Welles with Won’t You Come Out Tonight live for World Cafe. My name is Raina Duris,
hanging out with Jesse today on the show. A few years ago, you started filming yourself performing in the woods in Arkansas, and those videos and those songs started getting a lot of listeners, gaining a lot of traction. How did you first think about approaching sharing your music on social media?
Jesse Welles: Um, I saw a lot of other folks doing it and I thought, I’ll I’ll do that. [laughter]
Raina Durus: Fair enough.
Jesse Welles: Um I didn’t it seemed like what it seemed like the new format seemed like the the way you go about it.
Raina Durus: So what was your reaction when you started to see these songs were resonating with people?
Jesse Welles: Um initially it’s like oh god I can’t watch. Um, [clears throat] so I didn’t and I don’t but it did tell me to write more and to do more and so that’s that’s what I did.
Raina Durus: You have written a lot. I mean over the last two years I think you’ve put out eight full length albums. What happened in 2024 to to spur this rush of creativity?
Jesse Welles: You know, I had played music all my life and moved to Arkansas, back to Arkansas, after I’d been away in Nashville for about 7 years and I wasn’t playing any music at all and was really trying to give it up.
Raina Durus: Why?
Jesse Welles: Um [clears throat] because I thought if I could really scrape it off of myself, then I could see what life would be like without it. I thought maybe it was blurring my vision in some way. Maybe that wasn’t what I was supposed to do and to be doing it all the time was keeping me from doing something that I was made to do or or something like that, you know. Then my old man had a heart attack and open heart surgery and it was all real quick, you know. It’s like February 19th, I think, ’24. And I was up there in the hospital sitting next to him and there’s a reminder that just beside you that life is very short. I thought boy if he if he dies um I knew him for as an adult all of what nine years or something you know that’s all you get to know people for. Life’s awful short. And for some reason, and I don’t know how the book came to me, and I don’t know why I had a hold of it, um, but I did. I had the Woody Guthrie biography, and I thought, well, this is this guy knows how to live life. Maybe this is what I’m supposed to be doing right now. So, I left there, not really sure if he was going to make it or not, and kind of accepted if he hadn’t. I played out that scenario in my head and was trying to get cool with it. Be like, “All right, um, this is what the future would be with your father dead. “What on earth would you do with your time after that point? It’s like, well, try very hard to do something. So the songs started just kind of seeping out. If you really have something in you, you can’t really help it from coming out. You know, you can try to quit music or whatever, but you’ll be driving down the road and you’ll end up making up songs and stuff. They just start coming out by accident and then you know, well, you’re terminal and uh you you got to do it. Now, luckily, dad survived and everything s a-okay. Um but that was kind of the uh Damascus moment or whatever, you know.
Raina Durus: I’m glad your dad’s okay.
Jesse Welles: Yeah, me too.
Raina Durus: To give folks an idea of just how fast this happened, you bought a guitar on the way home from the hospital, right?
Jesse Welles: Yeah. I, you know, I didn’t need that guitar. I had a lot of guitars. Um, but [clears throat] I like them and so [laughter] I went and grabbed I went and grabbed that one. It was a uh it was an emotional purchase. Yeah.
Raina Durus: So, take us into your songwriting process a bit. What does it look like when you’re writing a song?
Jesse Welles: I have a lot of tunes going at any one time. Some of them, especially like a topical tune, it’ll be a whole lot of research trying to get, as I said earlier, like down to the center, down to the epicenter. Why is everybody talking? Not what is everybody talking, why is everybody talking?
Raina Durus: What does that research look like?
Jesse Welles: It means um a whole lot of tabs on your browser and just digging through um public gra digging through a bunch of browser and just digging through um public gra digging through a bunch of garbage [laughter] to uh to get, you know, to get to the point, taking in all that information and writing rhymes all along the way. I suppose the best ones always come when you’re not trying. Uh the refrain will come to you when you didn’t need it or want it or anything. You’re just trying to check out at the grocery store and that hits you and it’s like I’ve got to hurry home. Those moments are like I’m I’m having an emergency. Other times I can’t write anything and that’s also an emergency. [laughter] But yeah, you keep you keep quite a few tunes going at a time and they’re like pans on the stove or something cooking all sorts of stuff at different
temperatures and things get done at certain times and you start other things.
Raina Durus: Yeah. I know that in addition to musicians, you were also influenced by the comedian Mitch Hedber and a lot of your songs are very funny. And I’m thinking of the song Domestic Error on the new album where it almost sounds like there’s a call back to Hedber’s joke, I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to play clip that right now.
The Navy Seal came to me. He said, Boy, I’m going to tell you the news. I said, “Aren’t you CIA?” He said, “I used to I used to, but I still do too. So, we chewed our creatine gummies and I wondered if he was lying. I said, “What do you know about Vegas?” He said, “What do you know about dying?” He said, “It’s going to be a bloody 25.” He said, “There’s going to be some loss of life.” He gave me a one time code for 10% off Bluetooth and collagen peptides. Hotels and spaceships, Teslas, and tunnels are fine. Folks get too close to the big white house and they lose their goddamn mind.
Raina Durus: So, how do you think about using humor in songs to add clarity or to, you know, approach stuff that is sometimes pretty heavy?
Jesse Welles: Uh, you know, Guthrie said if you got something to say and it might be a bit provocative that you can say it and duck or say it with a big smile. Um, and maybe nobody will hit you. You know, I think sugar helps the medicine go down. And I like to laugh. A song can just be a whole row of punchlines. Why not? And so that’s where a tune like Domestic Error gets… Yeah.
Raina Durus: There’s a song on your new album called Technopagans. We’re going to hear you play it next. It gets into Silicon Valley and tech and AI. I want to ask you as a creative person and a prolific songwriter, what is your view on AI and and the way it’s being sold to us right now?
Jesse Welles: Yeah, I guess it is being sold to us. I kind of thought that we were being sold to it. It’s backwards looking. It takes on your data sets and uses that to make derivative content instead of humans making progress forward content, making something out of nothing. It still needs fuel to make things. We don’t we don’t much we can’t much help. I think if if humans have anything anything that they’re supposed to do, it’s probably to create things. And I don’t mean that everybody is a fine artist or or something like that. I don’t like I’ve said this before, but I mean it a great deal is some folks make spreadsheets and some folks make tables and some folks make wondrous theories and some people make paintings and other people make songs and we’re just supposed to be making something. And if you want to find the places where people have either relinquished or have had the ability to create things taken away from them are some of the most miserable places on the planet. And those places are working and laboring and laboring for your life. And absolutely no shade to anybody cuz I’ve we all have to work. Listen, I understand that and that’s pragmatic and stuff, but when you essentially become some some servant to a company or totally beholden to your manager at the McDonald’s, then you’ve had the ability to really create probably taken away from you by a situation a lot bigger than yourself.
Back to your AI question though. How do I feel about AI? I am slow to get upset about maybe some of the things that I hear folks upset about. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of anxiety about being replaced. Artists being replaced, jobs being replaced. I said on that first record, everything that can be replaced will be replaced. And that’s how it’s been since the dawn of time. There’s nobody running a switchboard down at AT&T anymore, connecting calls. That job’s gone. There’s hardly any friers chewing horses and we’re certainly not riding horses to our engagements around the town and stuff. And so the horse lost its job, you know, and uh the saddle maker and the tack wear maker. Things will be replaced. But I don’t see how AI could really replace human art. We are so flawed and inconsistent and complicated. How could that be recreated? And it’s what whether we know it or not, it’s what we love about one another when we when we look at art.
Raina Durus: Jesse Welles is my guest on World Cafe. He’s going to perform his song Technopagans next. Is there anything you’d like to tell us before we hear you play it?
Jesse Welles: This tune is kind of a spiritual movement going on and has been going on like in Silicon Valley. You see leaders in that industry, someone like Peter Thiel going around doing lectures on the Antichrist, saying that environmentalists, bloodites, people like Greta Thunberg are antichrist demons when wouldn’t you think what’s more dangerous for humanity is to continue to allow artificial intelligence grow at a rate faster than human cognissance? You do not know what you’re doing, but to admit that you don’t know what you’re doing, that would hurt shares. [laughter] This tune is probably chapter one or chapter two of my my getting through it, my trying to wrap my head around it. There’s a bit of resignation in this tune, but it it may not be that way forever.
Raina Durus: You’re listening to World Cafe. I’m Raina Durus and my guest today is Jesse Welles. You just heard him performing a song Technopagans from his new album Masks Off. You are very straightforward in your songs. You directly sing about things. Are you ever worried about or do you ever think about negative reactions you might get from people when you’re writing?
Jesse Welles: You can’t write a song like you’re playing chess or something like that. You shouldn’t be writing a song thinking about second and third wave reactions to a song. All you can really do is make the art as it as it comes out and as it’s true to you. Otherwise, you’ll get caught up in making something for somebody else. Um, and it’s not even you’re not even actually making it for somebody else, you’re making it for somebody else that you’ve imagined. So, that person would be probably very critical the way the mind works. you know, you would make up the anti- whatever you are, you know, and then you would be trying to write to that imaginary figure. That sounds like it’s not fun. And so, you just write um, exactly as it comes to you. Maybe folks will get upset and maybe folks will be really glad. It doesn’t much matter cuz you’re just doing your thing. Like that’s all you just have to keep going.
Raina Durus: So the last song that you’re going to play for us is a song that you’ve said.
Jesse Welles: I guess it’s a song about being me.
Raina Durus: Tell tell us a bit about this and not some other way.
Jesse Welles: Yeah, I guess this one’s a little self-indulgent. I just wrote it. I must have—I did a terrible thing and I wrote how I felt. [laughter]
Raina Durus: You’re awful.
Jesse Welles: I know. Real rotten.
Raina Durus: How dare you?
Jesse Welles: Um and lo and behold, it can be cryptic or complicated. We contain multitudes. So, kind of talking about things that are uncomfortable and how at the end of the day things are just what they are and you get to be okay with that or not, but you’ll probably live a little longer if if you would be okay with it. Yeah.
Raina Durus: Live for World Cafe, Jesse Welles. this and not some other way.
Raina Durus: That’s a song from his new album, Masks Off. Jesse has been my guest today. It’s been so so great having you here, Jesse. Thank you so much.
Minnesota Country Club Festival makes a scorching first impression
by Joel Swenson
Saturday afternoon belonged to Jesse Welles, who flat-out stole the entire weekend. Armed at first with just an acoustic guitar, harmonica, and a message, the folk singer gave a masterclass in holding a festival crowd’s attention on his own before his four-piece band joined him for an electrified “Join ICE” that set off the chant from the audience. As something of a Trump-era Woody Guthrie, Welles ran through his now-ubiquitous protest songs (“The Poor,” “United Health,” “Domestic Error”) plus covers of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” that proved he can shred with the best of them. If anyone can unite this country against the rise of fascism, my money’s on Jesse Welles.
Ahead of his highly anticipated debut at the Hudson River Music Festival on June 21, Jesse Welles stopped by the Relix office during a run of New York City performances to deliver three powerful songs touching on love, loss, and the growing influence of Silicon Valley. Currently crisscrossing North America with performances in parks, back alleys, and pop-up locations, Welles has emerged as one of the most compelling voices of the summer. Next, he’ll bring his captivating live show to Croton Point Park for his first appearance at the Hudson River Music Festival.
Jesse Welles: Unmasking the News, Technology and Pete Seeger’s Hudson River Legacy
Jesse Welles has arrived at his ancestral home, at least musically. It’s a hot, not-quite-muggy early June evening and the 33-year-old, Ozark, Ark.-bred folk singer is standing in New York’s Washington Square Park preparing for a pop-up show, a few days before the release of his most recent album of politically charged songs, Masks Off. Washington Square Park has long been a Mecca for free thinkers and counter-culture types and many of Welles’ musical heroes got their start congregating just a few feet away. The area is still a magnet for buskers. In fact, before Welles appeared, a sizable crowd developed around another rootsy combo that happened to set up shop under the park’s signature arch, with fans who had gotten wind of Welles’ surprise set mistaking the acoustic players for some sort of warm-up act for his mini-show.
When the rising musician does eventually emerge shortly after 6 p.m. a little deeper into Washington Square Park—closer to the Greenwich Village space’s iconic fountain—he blends right in with the crowd of onlookers, offering a mix of topical originals and a cover of John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” with special guest Margo Price sliding in to sing as well. Yet, while Welles is clearly indebted to a folk tradition ignited by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and their brethren, with Masks Off and much of his music in general, he’s addressing decidedly modern concerns—the album’s title-track rallies against the I.C.E. surge in Minnesota, the abduction of Venezuela’s leader and the post-D.O.G.E world while “Technopagans” is a warning about AI and technological overlords. “There’s a resurgence of spirituality, or maybe religion, in Silicon Valley and [Peter] Thiel got in front of it and might have seen it coming and was able to position himself so that an environmentalist—or somebody who is just pro-earth in general—may be seen as a luddite and an anti-Christ as opposed to supporting the technical growth that’s moving faster than human cognizance and the dangers that might exist there in,” he says a day earlier, while filming a video session at Relix’s New York office.
Masks Off is, somehow, already Welles’ sixth album of original music since he decided to “sing the news” in early 2024, while sitting at his father’s hospital bedside. Soon after, Welles started churning out music at an incredibly fast clip, recording songs in the forest and uploading them to social media, where they quickly spread. He also began barnstorming the country, playing over 250 shows a year and scoring both a Grammy nomination and the respect of his musical heroes along the way.
In the coming months, following Masks Off’s June 12 release, Welles will hit the road once again for another round of marquee dates. He will also headline a major festival for the first time when he appears at Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.’s Hudson River Music Festival—an event that grew out of Seeger’s long-running Clearwater/ the Great Hudson River Revival—alongside Price, Cimafunk and a unique pairing of Warren Haynes, Daniel Danato and Grahame Lesh, among others.
Before his busy summer truly takes off, Welles spent time digging into his latest collection of songs, his dynamic live show and the weight of carrying Seeger’s legacy down the road one song at a time.
Let’s start by discussing your new album, Masks Off, which you recorded during an incredibly impactful time for both your career, which was really starting to take off, and our country in general, which is in somewhat of a perilous state. For a few years, you have shared your new music seemingly in real time on TikTok and YouTube before recording those same tracks for proper studio releases. At what point did you feel like you had enough material to batch into what became Masks Off, which, to my mind, feels especially cohesive thematically?
I think I put out the song “Masks Off” itself on Jan. 1 or maybe Dec. 31—or something like that. I’d been over in Europe doing a tour. During all that time, so much news had gotten past me, so instead of popping in on different topics like I tend to do, you could just see an entire narrative moving along. I think that was the first time that I really wanted to address this whole movement—that the masks are off, things are just done out in the open and hate is open carry. Hard power is real and being advocated for by very powerful people, albeit very few people. A few people hold a lot of the wealth and a lot of the power in this world. So, that was the impetus of the tune “Masks Off.”
The tunes themselves, some of them were written last year, while on tour, and some of them were written just before I went out for tour. As you said, all of my tunes start as YouTube videos. We were recording them out in the woods. I don’t know exactly what they tell the story of—I didn’t really pick the tracks in order to convey some broader narrative. I just see them as patches in the quilt of ‘25 and ‘26.
You tracked Masks Off during three separate sessions with Eddie Spear, who our readers might be familiar with thanks to his work with Zach Bryan, David Shaw, Sierra Ferrell, Old Crow Medicine Show and many others. You have called your connection non-verbal or almost telepathic. Can you describe how your work together unfolded this time around?
The first session, we probably went in and did “Red,” “Domestic Error” and “This and Not Some Other Way,” simply because we had some time. We had a week before I had to take off. I came in and I just played him what I had—what I knew that I wanted to put the full band to or to have produced. And Ed does what he has almost always done with me, and that’s just mic the guitar, mic the vocal and just do takes, without having to do punch-ins. We’re not really seeking perfection theoretically—just perfection in the performance, warts and all. Those are the kind of takes we always get when doing this.
We’ve known each other for about a decade now, and he and I are able to work very quickly without having to communicate a whole lot. He knows what I want from myself, and I have an idea of what he’s looking for from me, although sometimes he’ll surprise me. But because we have that understanding, there’s really no need for any kind of pretense or, say, for him to click into me at the end of the take and say, “You know, that was really nice. And if you want to keep that, we can keep that, but I’d like you to try one more time.” All the time I just took up to say that, we don’t use any of that time.
We’ll get to the end of the take. He’ll know I didn’t like it. I’ll know he didn’t like it. We’ll go on, you know? We get what we want out of that process. He’s so intelligent that, a lot of the time, I’m just in awe of him while I’m in the recording room, and it humbles me to the point where I do feel like a kid with a few dumb chords and some silly words and a bad voice. He is able to orchestrate things around me musically—ideas that I’m incapable of ever having. So I really like working with that. I always have. That shorthand is so important for the creative process.
Folk songs are, historically, very improvisational and you have famously said that you are “singing the news” in your music. Your tunes also have multiple lives. You release them digitally, you record them for a proper album and then you play them live on tour. Do you consider the recorded version to be the final version and, if not, how much leeway do you give yourself to change your material once you are on the road and grappling with another day’s news?
It’s a little bit of both. They’re never really done. I’m never opposed to changing them once I’ve put them out or once I’ve gone out and I’ve tracked it myself. I’ll change the title. I’ll change the verses. I’ll change the chord structures and all that sort of stuff. Really, I just see that as kind of the raw material to work with. [The album version] is certainly a finished version of it, in the same way that songs are so much a product of the moment that they were made in. They are a product of that time, and I think that songs belong in a certain time. So in that way, it doesn’t make much sense to change things sometimes—sometimes they are very much finished because that song belongs to March 25, 2024, and today is a different year and a different day. And there’s no sense in beating a dead horse or anything like that. You can’t get too precious with any of them—make a new one, move on.
Speaking of changing your song titles, one of the tracks on your new album actually had a different name when you first wrote it.
“Won’t You Come Out Tonight” was called “A Pirate Looks at Oblivion,” which was just a joke. Jimmy Buffett has a tune called “A Pirate Looks at 40” or something like that. And I thought, “Well, what if instead of looking at 40, he looked at the void?” I got a kick out of it. But no one else did, which was definitely OK. So when someone suggests that I change the title, like a friend of mine did, I change the title. I’m not precious with it. Sometimes it’s good to listen to your friends who say things like, “The title of the song should contain some words that are actually in that song.”
But I also like it when [artists don’t change lyrics in their music, even when the references are dated.[ That’s how a song belongs—in time.
You had been performing and recording music for around a decade before you started to release protest music under your own name and began to really gain traction. You made the decision to start singing the news while reading a Woody Guthrie biography as you were sitting by your father’s bedside in the hospital, after he suffered a heart attack. How did Woody’s music originally enter your world, leading to this change in approach?
I had always known about Woody because, when I was a teenager, I got ahold of Dylan’s self-titled record, and it had “Song for Woody” on it and, of course, I was like, “Who’s this Woody?” And so I go down to the library, where I’d gotten the Dylan tape, and they had a Guthrie tape—a Woody Guthrie anthology—and I went, “He’s probably talking about this Woody.” So I listened to him and, sure enough, there’s no way he’s singing about some other Woody. And so there that was.
So I knew “Hard Travelin’” and I knew “This Land is Your Land” and I knew “Riding in My Car” and some fun tunes—stuff that, as a 14 year old or a 13 year old, I didn’t necessarily understand. “Pastures of Plenty,” I didn’t necessarily understand the history behind that either. Fast forward, and I’m 30. My dad had just had a heart attack and open-heart surgery, and I was sitting up in the hospital with him, and I had a Woody Guthrie biography with me. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you where I got it, and I don’t know what I was doing with it. But of all the books to have in the hospital, I happened to have that one with me. I was reading it and thinking, “If he dies now, I’ve known him all of 30 years. And of that, really, I’ve only known him about nine of those years.”
He didn’t die, but I didn’t know that at the time and I thought, “If he dies now, life is very short, and it’s moving past us all the time, or we’re maybe moving through it all the time, so I had better do something.” And having the example of Woody in that book before me, I thought, “Maybe this is what I should be doing.”
You had already been through the music industry ringer at that point. You played in bands, went to Nashville and even worked with Dave Cobb. Where were you, musically, when your dad had his heart attack?
I was at a point where I had pretty much given up on music, and I wasn’t playing anywhere. I wasn’t doing anything with it. I was just kind of sitting on my hands, trying to figure out what I was on this earth for. Singing the news, I didn’t know that’s what I needed to do. I wasn’t sure about anything, but I just decided to do it, and I felt very stupid for a lot of it, and I still do some days. But I just keep doing it.
The music that I had played all through my 20s was rock-and-roll music—I’d always had a rock-and-roll band. And, at the time of my dad’s heart attack, I had moved back to Arkansas in 2021. All music was kind of taken off the road, especially unsuccessful music like mine, at that time. And then I was playing country music in bars. I was mostly an acoustic-covers guy, and I would go and play Glenn Campbell and Tanya Tucker songs. It was not even really country music that people wanted to hear—it was just the country music that I was willing to play because that’s what I liked. I wasn’t gonna play anything else. I didn’t feel like learning “The Thunder Rolls” or some of these songs—“Big Green Tractor” or something like that. I just didn’t really want to play any of that. But I was still playing these soul-sucking cover gigs at little bars for about five, six or maybe 10 people that would kind of move in and out over the course of the evening, and I’d work for tips.
So I had gone from being signed and at least living in Nashville, even if there was nothing going on, to then living in a very small town in Arkansas, playing to five or six people. I had failed at whatever I had set out to do and whatever I was looking at was not a success by any means. And so that’s where I was at. And then with my dad—it looked like dad was dying, so things weren’t looking too hot. But then I decided to change course.
Though you regularly discuss current events in your songs, your music is also very personal, and you continue to look inward with your lyrics as well. While all original music is, to some degree, personal, how do you balance your more introspective songs and your more topical tunes on a given project in order to make it feel like a well-rounded effort?
With Masks Off, so much of me is stuck in it. Middle, which was three records ago now, I felt was pretty personal as well. [He takes a long pause and looks into the ether.] You know, honestly, I don’t think of the balance of it per se. I just kinda say, “These are the songs that I’d like to go forward with.”
You are headlining the Hudson River Music Festival on June 21. That festival grew out of Clearwater, which Pete Seeger established to clean up the Hudson River. You have described him as an architect for everything you do. When did you first become aware of his music?
Pete Seeger, I heard through a friend. It was in 2011, and he showed me a recording of “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” with all the children singing. And I thought, “This is incredible.” It was really an emotional thing to hear them sing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” and that was my first entry into Pete Seeger. And from there, I went down to the library again and got the Pete Seeger collection that they had. And I became acquainted with a lot of his union tunes and stuff like that. And then I learned about him more, honestly, in the Woody Guthrie book I read because Woody was, at a point, traveling with Pete Seeger, and they were doing shows together. You can still listen to some of the radio shows they did together. You can hear the whole cast of characters—what a time it was to be alive.
Looking ahead to your Hudson River set and your upcoming tour, now with six albums under your belt and likely more songs on the way, how do you construct your setlist each night? I know they are quite dynamic and change throughout a given run.
I’m still figuring that out. There’s so much music that you could play for any set, you know? And you can look out into the audience, and you can kind of guess who’s here for what. Some folks are really hollering out, and they really want to hear protest tunes. Some folks really want to hear “Bugs” and nature songs. And then some folks really want to hear personal tunes of mine and I just try to balance the three or four different genres that the Welles band kind of has right now. I try to divvy the set into segments so that everybody gets something that they came for. Nobody’s going to get all of what they wanted. And that’s just life. I don’t get all of what I want, you know? But I just try to pick things for everybody, and it changes up, and it’s going to continue to change, especially as we move into outdoor venues and we play the Hudson River Music Festival. We’ve never headlined a festival. So, we’re planning on having a sprawling show and going deeper into some tunes than we normally do and really exploring, sonically, what the five of us are capable of up there.
You must feel pretty confident and comfortable with your current band to change the show so regularly, often on a dime, depending on the audience’s vibe.
They’re so talented. They can really go in any direction. Sometimes the best thing for me to do is to actually just not play. So, I try to get out of their way.
Festivals have long been a part of the folk tradition and important community-building events in general. As you mentioned, this is your first time headlining a fest of this stature. What does playing the event mean to you going into it?
It’s an honor to be part of the Hudson River Music Festival—to carry the legacy, carry the torch that Seeger lit years ago. He kept it going for so long. When you think about singing the news or really doing any type of protest music—or topical music or awareness music or however you want to put it—you go back to Pete Seeger for the template. That’s where you start and everything else is an augmentation. Between he, Woody and those that traveled on with them, they really began the tradition in America. So to aspire to be in league with those guys, that’s a true honor.
During the past few years, you have had the opportunity to meet and perform with a number of your musical heroes and early idols. Is there an established musician who you’ve engaged with that’s offered you some particularly impactful advice or shaped your musical outlook?
Yeah, meeting Joan Baez and then going in and recording with Joan and getting to the point where now, when I’m over in California and I’m by her, we’ll go and get lunch. We’ll go and get dinner, and she’s gotten to know my wife. What I’ve learned from her—and this might seem like whatever, but I get a kick out of it—is that she is never too serious. I think it must be very important to mentally age so gracefully, to never really crystallize, to never really become hard and cruel and to remain supple and flexible and to be able to take on new ideas—all while keeping your core principles about you. I think that that’s something Joan has perfected and something that I aspire to attain at some point. She’s just having fun and she knows when to just laugh.
You are currently in the midst of rolling out a new album, which requires spending a lot of energy on promotion and often forces you to look backward a bit. As a prolific songwriter, do you find that this juncture in an album cycle is a natural time to take a step back, or does it push you ever more to jump back into your creative process?
There’s no time to stop, no time to think, no time to look back or anything like that. I’m glad that those tunes will be out, and I will feel that, once they are out there, a weight has been lifted off me, and I’ll feel as light as a feather. And then I will hop down the road for new tunes.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (May 21, 2026) — The Americana Music Association has announced the nominees for its 25th annual Americana Honors & Awards. The winners will be announced during the Americana Honors & Awards on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026, at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The celebrated program is the hallmark event of AMERICANAFEST, which returns for its 26th year on Sept. 15-19, 2026…
ARTIST OF THE YEAR:
Brandi Carlile
Charley Crockett
Margo Price
Molly Tuttle
Jesse Welles
The Americana Music Association honors distinguished members of the music community with five member-voted annual awards. Lifetime Achievement honorees, who will be announced at a later date, are also recognized during the ceremony.
For more than two decades, the prestigious ceremony has celebrated pioneering mainstays and trailblazing newcomers, while featuring unforgettable moments in musical history including Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash’s last live performance together, as well as offering show-stopping appearances by Sierra Ferrell, Brandi Carlile, Allison Russell, Noah Kahan, 49 Winchester, Mavis Staples, Bob Weir, Buddy Guy, John Prine, Bonnie Raitt, Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris & Daniel Lanois, Shelby Lynne, Lukas Nelson, The Avett Brothers, The Lumineers, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Fantastic Negrito, Margo Price, John Fogerty and many more.
The Americana Music Association is a professional not-for-profit trade organization whose mission is to advocate for the authentic voice of American roots music around the world. The Association produces events throughout the year, including AMERICANAFEST and the Americana Honors & Awards program. The Americana Music Association receives generous support from the Tennessee Department of Tourism, Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp, ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC.
JESSE WELLES: (Singing) War isn’t murder. Good men don’t die. Children don’t starve and all women survive.
SCHMITZ: His song “War Isn’t Murder” has millions of views across social media.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “WAR ISN’T MURDER”)
WELLES: (Singing) Let’s talk about dead people. I mean a dead people.
SCHMITZ: The 33-year-old does not mince words.
WELLES: I really think people are made to create stuff. Some people build tables, and some people make pottery. Some people make spreadsheets. I make tunes.
SCHMITZ: You make a lot of them.
WELLES: Yeah. I’m sorry.
SCHMITZ: Sorry or not, Welles’ songs are gaining traction. He’s been called the TikTok Troubadour, modern-day Bob Dylan. He’s even friends with Joan Baez. He says he’ll never be a giant like those folk legends, but he says they have one thing in common, limitations on time.
WELLES: Players had to shorten their tunes up for them to fit on 45s. For me, it was like, I’m going to squeeze as much of these thoughts as I can down into 90 seconds, which was the length of a Instagram reel.
SCHMITZ: Welles films himself playing freshly written songs in a forest near his home in Arkansas, in a clearing made for power lines.
WELLES: It’s a quiet place, close enough to the road that I don’t have to walk too far, but far enough from the road that I can’t hear the cars go by. I like it out there.
SCHMITZ: And with the news coming at us every which way these days, I ask Welles how he decides on what to sing about.
WELLES: I guess when I reckon I have an opinion. It feels like been constant chaos, constant distraction being used as a tool. It’s being implemented to stupefy Americans. Chaos, total and constant psychological war on the ability for anybody to concentrate on one thing long enough to fully take in the ridiculousness and the cruelty of it all. All pretense has been thrown out. When they do something, it’s for obvious reasons now. They don’t even bother hiding. That’s where, like, “Masks Off” comes from. The masks are off.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “MASKS OFF”)
WELLES: (Singing) All the masks are off, and they don’t even try. They know that you know that they know, and they don’t even mind it. All the masks are off, and they’re getting lazy. They think you’re so d*** stupid. They think you’re so d*** crazy.
SCHMITZ: I can tell that you feel strongly about this. It makes you angry, right? And so is that the process, where you just – you see something, it bothers you and say, hey, I got to write this down?
WELLES: For some things, yes. Other things, I love them so much that I can’t shut up about them. Oftentimes, those are the nature tunes and stuff like that. But with topical stuff, it’s usually – I don’t know. A question has kind of been on the forefront of my mind lately is, are we our brother’s keeper? Am I my brother’s – is it my gig? If I see a scam going down, if I see some kind of injustice, wouldn’t it be up to me to almost warn those about it, or to bring the quiet part out into the open so that we can all kind of discuss this and be informed together? That’s how I feel about those things.
SCHMITZ: Jesse, are you religious?
WELLES: No. I’m pretty convinced that there are secrets. There are things that I can’t see, but I’m just as convinced that they’re right in front of me and that if I just sit still and listen, what’s hidden will be revealed.
SCHMITZ: I mean, you kind of mentioned in your last answer the things that maybe you’re angry about but also the things that you love about life…
WELLES: Yeah.
SCHMITZ: …Right? And I think you’re referring to this – a bunch of songs that you did. I think it was called “All Creatures Great And Small.” Is that right?
WELLES: Yeah.
SCHMITZ: Yeah. And that album is just – what I love about that album is that every song title is just one word, “Turtles,” “Bugs.” It just goes down the line. (Laughter).
WELLES: Yeah.
SCHMITZ: And actually, the song, “Turtles,” was one of my favorites.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “TURTLES”)
WELLES: (Singing) Turtles. (Vocalizing).
SCHMITZ: It’s about the beauty and wonder and awe of what a turtle can do.
WELLES: “Turtles” just comes out of my bona fide love for turtles.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “TURTLES”)
WELLES: (Singing) They got places to go and things to see, and they don’t need you, and they don’t need me tellin them…
I’ve always been fascinated with them, and I’ve always seen them everywhere I go, here in Arkansas and really anywhere. I just always have my eyes open for the turtles. I just – I love all critters.
SCHMITZ: Let’s talk about another song of yours. It’s called “Red.”
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “RED”)
WELLES: (Singing) I got a red house and a red car, runs on big red batteries. Used to be blue 15 minutes ago but then turned red just for me.
SCHMITZ: You know, this is clearly about the Trump administration, about President Trump. You talk about his red hat, red tie, big pen. The part of the song that I found most interesting is where you talk about when the war comes.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “RED”)
WELLES: (Singing) When the war gets here, we’re all gonna hold hands. All the Baptists and the Catholics, all the Marxists and the fascists.
SCHMITZ: And I felt like you’re saying here that when people get to the point where they’re fighting for their beliefs instead of, you know, those who are manipulating those beliefs, that there’ll be some sort of unity in that. Or am I way off base there?
WELLES: I don’t think that you’re off base, but really what I reckon is that a lot of the fighting amongst us, a lot of our arguments won’t seem like such a big deal when a real war hits the beaches. Or maybe it’s that the war has been waged against us by getting us to fight within ourselves and amongst ourselves. And we were just pawns in it all along.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “RED”)
WELLES: (Singing) I got some red pills and a bottle. I got black and blue ones, too. All the pills are all the same. The illusion is you choose.
SCHMITZ: You know, you’re probably one of the only singers that I listen to that sings about the U.S. healthcare system. You have many songs about this. You’ve got this one song called “United Healthcare” (ph). It encapsulates so many people’s frustrations with insurance companies.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “UNITED HEALTH”)
WELLES: (Singing) There’s an office in a building and a person in a chair. And you paid for it all, though you may be unaware. You paid for the paper. You paid for the phone. You paid for everything they need to deny you what you’re owed. There ain’t no you.
SCHMITZ: There’s one line in it that I wanted to ask you about. When you sing, CEOs come and go, and one just went. And I’m assuming here you’re talking about United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was murdered in New York City. You know, I heard that line, and I paused a little. And I’m wondering, when you wrote this song, did you struggle over that line?
WELLES: When they murdered him, I put up on Threads that no man’s death should be celebrated and was promptly informed just how everyone else felt about that. I still believe that no man’s death should be celebrated. I think it does the dead no good, and it does the living even worse. But there are times where the ingredients you got bake the cake that you get. And it’s incredibly unfortunate that somebody felt – that so many feel – that they are in such a hopeless position that somebody else’s death would fix it. That’s a sad state of affairs.
SCHMITZ: I want to talk about one more of your songs. In your song, “The Poor,” you sing about poverty and almost about how often poor people are blamed for being poor.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “THE POOR”)
WELLES: (Singing) If you worked a little harder, then you’d have a lot more. So the blame and the shame’s on you for being so d*** poor. It ain’t the fight…
SCHMITZ: Tell me about the process of writing this song. What went into that?
WELLES: You grow up hearing these things tossed out amongst the people in your town, which is comical looking back because we were all living in some strata of poverty. But still, one would tell the other, if you worked a little harder, you wouldn’t be so poor. It’s your own fault you’re poor. It’s your own fault you’re fat. It’s your own fault you’re this or that. It always – it was always the person, the individual’s fault. And I just try to take those little meaningless backwards aphorisms that I grew up with and turn them on their head.
SCHMITZ: You know, there’s one line in that song where you say – you’re talking about, I was selling chocolate bars. I had a disorder. I was cutting up a frog, got lost in the fog, learning how to play a recorder. I mean, this brings up so many memories of school for most Americans, I think.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “THE POOR”)
WELLES: (Singing) I was selling chocolate bars. I had a disorder. I was cuttin’ up a frog. Got lost in the fog learning how to play a recorder. If you only worked a little harder.
It’s an autobiographical tune. What I thought stood out was that they had us selling chocolate bars as fundraisers for band instruments. This school – they couldn’t afford books, couldn’t afford music instruments. You can’t even afford school lunches, but the football field would be put in – a turf field would be put in. And the whole football team would have new helmets and shoulder pads, but you couldn’t afford a tuba for the d*** band, so much so that they’d have the kids go out and work for it. And I just thought that was backwards.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “THE POOR”)
WELLES: (Singing) If you worked a little harder, ah-ha. If you worked a little harder, ah-ha.
SCHMITZ: How long are you going to be doing this, Jesse, you know, this formula of filming yourself out in the forest?
WELLES: I don’t know. Maybe I’ll stop today. Maybe I’ll do it until I’m old and gray. I don’t know.
SCHMITZ: I feel like you just had the first lines of a song there.
WELLES: Maybe. I guess you’ll have to send me the recording.
SCHMITZ: (Laughter) Well, we will do that.
WELLES: (Laughter).
SCHMITZ: That is singer-songwriter Jesse Welles. Jesse, it is a sincere pleasure to speak with you.
WELLES: Thanks for talking with me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “SPIRIT QUEST”)
WELLES: (Singing) Ain’t it funny how the things you thought you needed were just prisons of the mind?
